Choosing a Content Management System
May 20th, 2005 | by Tim Wilson |Do you need a content management system (CMS) for your school or district Web site? Absolutely. In a world where Plone, Drupal, Mambo, and many other free and open source solutions exist, you would need to convince me that you shouldn’t use a CMS. It’s clear to me that individually maintained Web pages just don’t cut it anymore. By utilizing a CMS you can:
- distribute management of Web content to the persons and groups that are most responsible for it
- instantly improve your site’s design by utilizing one of the many templates that are typically provided with the CMS software
- gain immediate improvement in your site’s accessibility, usability, and standards compliance
- make your site searchable
- easily add blogging, wiki, and many other interesting features that will encourage collaboration (instant RSS!)
- improve access to information for everyone in your community
Adopting a CMS can be a daunting process. Do yourself a favor and check out the CMS Matrix and OpensourceCMS Web sites. They provide side-by-side comparisons of all of the most popular solutions and will help you get a sense of the scope of features that a CMS provides.
Anyone have any feedback on a particular solution that they’ve used? Post about your experiences (good or bad) and recommendations in the comments.
Tags: Open source, wiki
7 Responses to “Choosing a Content Management System”
By Dan T on May 21, 2005 | Reply
How do you see the use of Plone, for example, as different than Moodle for a school?
I installed Plone today on an OSX machine, very nice and easy, but not necessarily as powerful as Moodle.
DT
By Tim Wilson on May 21, 2005 | Reply
There is an unfortunate collision of acronyms here. CMS can stand for “Content Management System” or “Course Management System.” I don’t really see Plone and Moodle as competitors in the same space. I would use Plone for a school district intranet and Moodle for online learning. You’d be hard-pressed to hack either one to do the other’s job.
By Syamsul on May 23, 2005 | Reply
Hello my school’s website recently made the switch to Mambo and it’s easy to designate different people to be able to edit (only) certain pages. You can see it at http://www.btvss.moe.edu.sg
I recently used Drupal for a school website too, but this one will be built almost entirely on user submissions (not yet launched). I detailed the steps in my blog (search for “drupal” at http://syamsul.net )
My overall impression is that Mambo is easier to set up, but it seems more suitable for corporate-style websites while Drupal is better for collaborative-type websites.
By Tim Wilson on May 25, 2005 | Reply
Syamsul, thanks for the post. The information you posted about Drupal (http://www.syamsul.net/index.php/2005/04/30/on-to-drupal-part-3-installation-and-configuration/) is especially interesting. I think we’ll take a serious look at Drupal for our school’s intranet project. I see it coming down to Plone vs. Drupal at this point. (Not that there won’t be other contenders if we keep looking.)
By Andrea Pokrzywinski on Jun 16, 2005 | Reply
I am in the process of converting most of our websites to a content management system.
At this point I am using Wordpress for the public sites that I want to look snazzy. I am using Moodle for projects sites that are geared to supporting an activity as opposed to presenting information.
But I am really intrigued with the power of Mambo. I want to eventually migrate to this system. I am struggling to get my arms around the organizational structure and options. It has a higher learning curve than Wordpress. At the same time it has the features we need in the long tun. I would love to hear from others that are using Mambo.
By Rolly Maiquez on Jan 7, 2006 | Reply
Hello … I converted our school’s website (www.stjohnsguam.com) from a Dreamweaver-based/created site to Mambo (version 4.5.0) back in October 2004. Mambo 4.5.0 at that time was amazing — it was fun and easy to use and creating/editing pages was a quick process that could be achieved from any computer with decent web access speeds. I also started using Moodle (ver. 1.5, I believe) at that time (www.sjscoolschool.com/online and http://www.edtechworld.com). I immediately “got” what Moodle was all about and have been using it since then for my classes and have shared its greatness with my co-teachers who were interested in something like Moodle.
I’ve since upgraded Mambo and Moodle every time a new stable version came out. At the time that Moodle 4.5.1 came out, I started “playing” with other CMS’s — B2E, Xoops, Drupal, and a few others — can’t remember their names right now. Somehow, at least for me, Mambo just was easier, made more sense, and there were so many remplates, components, and modules available in so many websites that it made testing these things just plain fun. It also honed my mambo skills a little bit. When Joomla came out, I immediately tried it. I’m at Joomla 1.0.5 right now in some of my sites and I love it! I think I’m sticking with Joomla. I hope I’m making the right decision here!
I have around 12 Mambo installations, a few WordPress installations, around four Joomla installations, and four Moodle installations. For education, it’s really Joomla and Moodle for me. I never did a complete in-depth comparison of CMS’s. Mambo and Moodle were both recommended to me by a fellow educator back then and both seem to work very well for our school’s purposes.
By RAK on Jan 10, 2008 | Reply
We recently began implementing SharePoint CMS for a few K-12 districts and have heard great feedback from administrators and professors across the board. Administrators that previously were in charge of updating content using Dreamweaver or Frontpage can now train professors and faculty to use a WYSIWYG Editor. SharePoint is also gearing up to be 100% 508 compliant, which is an important part of the CMS.